In Indiana, my mother faced poor soil, bad weather, and vigorous pests. My father, no gardener himself but definitely a helpful man, dragged bag after bag of manure and lime to her gardens each season in an effort to improve the soil, to little apparent effect. Still, she persisted.
We had no garden center in Franklin, so my mother purchased plants from catalogues and had the nurseries ship them to her. Each spring would witness the arrival of new additions, and each summer would witness her disappointments. Smitten by its description in the Wayside Garden catalogue, she once bought a Potentilla. According to the Wayside catalogue, this plant is “Hardy to zone 2, adaptable to poor soils,” and “is covered with masses of bright yellow flowers from May to October and is easy to grow. Can be placed almost anywhere in the sun successfully.”
Our Franklin house faced east, providing southern light on the side where my mother placed the Potentilla. No bloom, however, could she coax from this plant save the occasional pale-yellow short-lived pop. In a fit of pique she gave it to our neighbor who planted it on the northern side of his house, where it proceeded to bloom profusely. “He has such a green thumb,” cried my mother, “and he must have better soil.”
When my mother threw down the trowel on the Potentilla, however, she acted uncharacteristically, for she was a veritable Churchill in the garden. From her, not him, I learned never to surrender. Each year my dad would buy her a rose bush for Mother’s Day, and each season we watched as black spot, powdery mildew, rust, cankers and galls attacked that new plant and all the old ones too. Yet never ever did it occur to my mother to give up trying to grow roses. No matter the defeats she experienced, she kept on, convinced that this year she would realize the promise of the catalogues.
Poor soil, bad light, black spot and powdery mildew challenged my mother, but against her true enemies – the weather and the slugs – she was powerless. If there was a dark force in my mother’s universe it was the midwestern wind, coming out of the west, tearing across the garden, destroying her beloved plants. When she realized – from the change of light, a drop in the temperature, a peculiar greenish-yellow cast to the sky – that a storm was about to descend, she would tear off her apron and race out to “tie up the peonies” or “cover the lilies” or “stake the delphiniums” against her mortal foe. As the storm broke, my genteel mother would curse as she watched her beauties lashed and torn by the wind.
When days were fair, however, the slugs would come and gorge themselves on her favorites. Though my mother purchased every remedy she could find in store or catalogue, none stopped the carnage. And so she resorted to the humble saltshaker. After a gentle rain, the kind a gardener prays for, she would go out and subject every slug she could find to a ghastly death of desiccation. Though kind-hearted, my mother would return from her campaign of slaughter, deeply satisfied.
In all the houses of my childhood, my mother hung a photo of the cottage in Ireland where her father had been born and raised, and which he left, according to family lore, at the age of ten. His father had come to Ireland from Oxford, England, to be the gamekeeper on the estate of an absentee English landlord. My mother once asked her father, “How did you as Protestants get along so well in Catholic Ireland?” “Ah,” he said, “the priest liked my mother.”
In this photo, which today hangs in my living room, two stone benches face each other in the arched and covered entryway to the cottage. In my imagination, I place my great-grandmother on one of these benches and the local priest, whom I envision as young and rather attractive, on the other. Though the photo was taken when the trees were leafless, in my fantasy it is a summer afternoon. They sit across from each other, talking. Perhaps my great-grandmother has fixed tea and cakes for him and perhaps he is regaling her with parish gossip. I am convinced they share a love for plants, for in this photo I see a garden, albeit one that is dormant. The cottage is covered in vines, shrubs sit in front of it, and trees, both conifer and deciduous, surround it. Paths that might lead to other gardens appear on both sides.
I have never been to the Carew estate in County Wexford, I never knew my great-grandmother, but I believe she was a gardener. And I believe that my grandfather, who I later discovered left Ireland at fourteen, not ten as family lore would have it, kept alive his love for his mother through gardening. For my grandfather was a gardener. The moment he got home from the grocery store which he owned and ran, he would go out to the garden.
“I would ask my mother, ‘Where is Dad?’” my mother remembered, “and she would answer, ‘Out in the garden, dear, staking delphiniums.’”
My mother worshipped her father, and her love of gardening came from him and kept him present for her. I loved my mother and my memories of her come filled with memories of her gardens. But I have no memories of learning to garden from her. I remember only being given the job of clearing out and cleaning up the long untended gardens at the house my parents bought two years after moving to Franklin. My brother and I weeded out endless Rose of Sharon seedlings from along the back fence and spent hours pulling up what turned out to be poison ivy from around the fishpond. But I did not help her plant the gardens she created in the spaces we cleared, nor did I help her to maintain them. I did not weed or deadhead or prune or stake or pore over catalogues with her.
Why? Did I seem uninterested? Was I uninterested? Did she think I was too busy with my own burgeoning life? Was I too busy? Was the garden her own special project, the place where she got to be Mary, not Mom? Was my energy not good for her garden? Because I too have learned that you must be careful who you invite into your garden.
Still, from my mother I learned that gardening can be difficult, frustrating, full of grief and things you can’t control, but also a way of being in the world so deeply rooted that you would not, indeed could not, give it up.
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